Dublin novelist shortlisted for literary award

Colum McCann, a Dubliner, is one of seven novelists who have been shortlisted for the £100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest literary prize.

The announcement was made yesterday at Ireland House in New York by the Dublin Lord Mayor, Ms Mary Frehill. This is the fifth year of the award, which was won last year by Andrew Miller for his novel Ingenious Pain.

This is Colum McCann's second time to make the IMPAC shortlist; his first novel, Songdogs, was nominated in 1997. His latest nomination is for This Side of Brightness, which was also shortlisted for the 1999 Irish Times Literature Awards.

Others on the shortlist are the Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, for Paradise, Michael Cunningham for The Hours and Philip Roth for I Married a Communist: Cunningham and Roth respectively won the 1998 and 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Nicola Barker has been shortlisted for Wide Open, Jackie Kay for Trumpet, and Alice McDermott for Charming Billy.

McCann (35), who now lives in New York with his wife and two daughters, is also the author of a short-story collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River. He is currently adapting his first novel, Songdogs, for the screen.

This Side of Brightness is set in the subway tunnels which carry trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and its characters include those who originally built the tunnels and the shifting population of homeless people who live there now.

For his research, McCann spent several months visiting the tunnels, talking to the people who lived there and mapping the physical and metaphysical geography of the place.

The seven titles on the IMPAC shortlist were selected from a list of 101, nominated by public libraries in 34 countries. All nominations were then processed in Dublin by the Literary Award office in Dublin City Public Libraries. The 101 books were read by an international panel of five judges.

The winner will be announced at Dublin Castle on May 9th.